“And so,” said Donellan, “if man cannot get to the Pole, the Pole must come to man?”
“Just so!” said Barbicane.
CHAPTER VIII.
LIKE JUPITER.
Yes! Like Jupiter.
At the time of that memorable meeting in honour of Michel Ardan—so appropriately mentioned by the orator—if J. T. Maston had excitedly exclaimed, “Let us right the Earth’s axis,” it was because the daring and fantastical Frenchman, one of the heroes of the Moon Voyage, had chanted his dithyrambic hymn in honour of the most important planets of our solar system. In his superb panegyric he had celebrated the special advantages of the giant planet, as we briefly reported at the time.
The problem solved by the calculator of the Gun Club was the substitution of a new axis of rotation for the old one on which the Earth had turned ever since in popular phrase, “the world was a world.” This new axis of rotation would be perpendicular to the plane of its orbit; and under such conditions the climatal situation of the old Pole would be much the same as that of Trondhjem, in Norway, in spring-time. The palæocrystic armour would thus naturally melt under the rays of the Sun; and at the same time climate would be distributed over the Earth as the climates are distributed in Jupiter.
The inclination of our planet’s axis, or in other terms, the angle which its axis of rotation makes with the plane of its ecliptic is 66° 32′. A few degrees would thus bring the axis perpendicular to the plane of the orbit it describes round the Sun.
But—it is important to remark—the effort that the North Polar Practical Association was about to make would not, strictly speaking, right the Earth’s axis. Mechanically, no force, however considerable, could accomplish that. The Earth is not like a chicken on a spit, that we can take it in our hand and shift it as we will. But the making of a new axis was possible—it may be said easy—if the engineers only had the fulcrum dreamt of by Archimedes and the lever imagined by J. T. Maston.
But as it had been decided to keep the invention a secret until further orders, all that could be done was to study the consequences. And to begin with, the journals and reviews of all sorts appealing to the learned and the ignorant devoted themselves to considering how Jupiter was affected by the approximate perpendicularity of his axis to the plane of his orbit.
Jupiter, like Mercury, Venus, the Earth, Mars, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, forms part of the solar system, and sweeps round at nearly five hundred million miles from the central fire; and his volume is about fourteen times that of the Earth.